Dr Ckubyrb's Personal Log
by Hounsou
Summary: How to hate work


Dr. Cliburn's Personal Log By Dr. Rayce Cliburn

Some personal field experiences that prompted me to start this Department. Actually, some of these are second hand, but in my twenty years as a doctor I just ran across things that couldn't depend on conventional scientific and medical wisdom.  
----- Personal audio-tape excerpt from December, 8, 2004.

I don't know why I got this call at two in the morning. I was tired and I had to be in the Lab early to oversee a crucial gene sequencing. These kinds of errands are for the young- I thought house calls were over in my intern days. It was an old friend from Oxford who was now working in the States. So, kindly old me, I agreed to drive down to the shipyards where he said to meet me. I ran back inside and grabbed my trench when I heard the first rumblings of what looked like a evening shower.

I must admit to being a scant bit nervous. I just bought my SAAB two months before, and my wife said that since it was MY mid-life crisis, she wanted no part of the SAAB- especially the bills. After the rash of mysterious slayings the last few days in the warehouse district on the Bay, I was also scared for my safety. I took along the new Taser that my ever paranoid friend Klay, convinced my to buy a short while ago.

I looked at my hastily scrawled note on the address to see if I was heading in the right direction. It was a tad hard to read from the illumination of the car gauges. It didn't help that I was half asleep when I wrote it down, and well, you know what they say about doctor's handwriting- it's all true: terrible. Just terrible. I sometimes think that those of us with sloppy handwriting become doctors to have an excuse for it.

But I digress, I was looking at my poor note when it started to down-pour making things worse. I was halfway over the causeway to the shipyards when I saw a lighting strike on the docks. It was awful loud and then all the lights on other side of the bay went out. Delightful. Undaunted, I drove across the bridge and knew I had chose the right direction when my nostrils smelled that overwhelming stench of dead fish and rotting seaweed. Even the SAAB's air conditioning couldn't filter it out.

A scant ten minutes later I found the right dock-Pier 34A. Yes, this was the place alright. The shadow of a large cargo ship loomed over the entire pier. She was large. I couldn't quite make out the name until a flash of thankfully distant lightning helped out. The AMAZON QUEEN. I also noticed that it seemed half of the cargo was already unloaded but the dock was disturbingly quite and abandoned except for the occasional crash of thunder.

Okay. I said to myself- friend or no, the man has fifteen minutes and then a warm bed awaits. I waited, nervously tapping my Swiss watch. Another present from a friend- this time from Frau Frieda. My first love. Whenever I feel uneasy, I have this habit of tapping it which seems to calm me and remind me of happier times with Frieda.

Just about to give up, I saw a shadowy form walk down the gang plank between lightning flashes to my car. I turned on my headlights and, much to my relief it was Harry Walsh, the man I had come here to meet.

He walked up to my car and still unwilling to expose myself to the elements I rolled down the window, "Well, what's all the fuss about? It is now hmm 3:45 am you know."

"Sorry Rayce old friend, but you just HAD to see this for yourself. I hardly believed it myself when I got the call this evening. Sorry for the cloak and dagger routine; I felt that you might not come out if I had told you over the phone."

My bones complaining, I got out of the car to be greeted by a torrential downpour just now noticing that Harry seemed unperturbed by the cold rain. It must have been really something. Before walking too far, remembering, I turned and armed my car alarm. "Well, is this a bug? Is it isolateable? Contagious? After all, that IS the reason you called me, right? And just HOW is your Company wrapped up in this? I just can't make the connection..."

Harry smiled," You have all your questions answered when we get there. But to ease you mind- I did get a team in here earlier and have it the area locked down in a Bio-safety 4 containment cell. But to answer on the WHY we are here, let's just say that the cargo is owned by my bosses parent company. By the way, what's the progress with your pet project?"

This was Harry's tactic of changing the subject- he always did favour being overly melodramatic. "I've got minimal funding and have the basement space in Atlanta promised for me. I still have to see Senator Greenwood in two weeks. One of those hands-on types"

"Sounds like he doesn't trust anyone else with the details. You decide on a name yet?" Harry fished in his pocket and pulled out a badge with a strip on it and handed to me.

"I was playing with VECTOR SIX as a name. What's the badge for?"

"Well, you know how uptight the corporate types are with 'trade secrets'. Genome-Tech doesn't seem to understand that free trade of ideas is what gets things done between scientists. The strip measures radioactive count. When it goes from red to black you had better get to a safe place.", He smirked.

Oh, well this eased my mind! "Uh, Harry..."

"Were here, (put your badge on). This is my senior Genome-Tech field analyst, Shandra Hart. She is an expert in Aquatic life forms and specialises in deep sea life-forms and how they survive there. Mrs. Hart, this is Dr. Cliburn a consultant from GT's Seattle HQ. He works at Helix Industries."

...I went along with this charade. Mrs. Hart seemed to buy the cover- not surprising since Harry was a smooth talker from way back. I mean, I was here right? After the introductions, she filled us in on the situation:

The AMAZON QUEEN, registered in Chile, departed from South America three weeks ago with a cargo of Urns due for the Metropolitan Museum in town. It seems the Urns were unusual in several ways. They were found in the ruins of a previously undiscovered Aztec city. The ruins were found by a corporation called PENTEX clearing jungle for farmland. An archaeologist was called in and PENTEX was forced to move to another plot of land by the government. The Urns were found remarkably well preserved and still sealed in the depths of the central step pyramid in the ruins. The Archaeologist expressly stated that the urns were not to be opened until in a safe place in the Museum to also get air sample from when they were sealed. The urns also had a kind of mythic history carved on them that linked the Aztec, Toltecs and Mayans together and seemed to mention important cities and general locations of one large ancient nation. A major find and sure to leave Mezzo-American Anthropology in turmoil for years.

This is where it gets interesting. The archaeologist arranged for the entire batch of urns to be shipped back in the AMAZON QUEEN. He stayed behind to survey the site further. The crew of the A. Queen. Apparently superstitious sailors locked the hold and refused to go below. The one remaining crewman says that one of his friends, Quartermaster 2nd mate Carlos Horhez thought differently. He thought that the urns had treasure in them and the crew was told the stories to keep them away from them.

One calm night, Carlos slipped into the hold and opened an urn. It was then that all hell broke loose. That night crew-members on deck reported seeing a shimmering silvery archway appear in front of the ship. As the ship, unable to correct or avoid it, passed through the sky became day and the sun was up. The water was also the brightest blue they had ever seen. Conflicting reports included seeing large specimens of Whale and dolphin and everything seemed in vivid detail and bright rich colours. this went on for about two hours and just a quickly the sky flashed and they were in the night again. The Navigator noted that they were hundreds of miles off course and down by the Southern tip of South America.

The First mate after the phenomenon, when seeing that Carlos was late for his shift, began looking for him and asked the survivor Carlos's' whereabouts. The man scared for his job confessed to everything. The First mate went into the hold with his flare gun and he didn't return either. The word spread through the crew like wildfire and everyone refused to go below. So another officer went below, the mechanic. He found the frozen bodies of both men and an open urn. When touching Carlos, the body fell over an shattered. The first mate screamed and ran to the ladder and caught the glimpse of something shiny moving in the depths of the hold. He instinctively fired the flare gun and climbed up and slammed the hatch shut.

Understandably, the crew locked the hold and placed guards on the hatch. At this point all considered it suicide to go below. But the thing was not satisfied and managed to slip out of the hold. According to the logs on the journey it slowly picked off the crew, who did not know how to catch it, during the night hours. In the ensuing ruckus the decision to go to a port any port was made but someone when being attacked damaged the controls and the emergency auto-pilot was locked on. With the fear and insanity that seemed to be gripping the ship one man smashed the radio and some crew members jumped ship. The Captain's logs reports that assorted crew swore seeing a white squid with spider legs scuttling about the ship in the dark places of the ship.

"Well DOCTOR Cliburn, what do you make of it?" Harry seemed quite pleased with himself.

Taking a deep breath, "Well, it would seem that the air sample in the urn contained some sort of airborne bug that we haven't seen fro millennia. Who can say what effect such germ might have on our system with no natural defenses. Hell, it could come from outer space for all we care."

'MRS'. Hart did not seem too pleased with my statement, "Brass tacks doctor.I'd like theories not wild fancy".

Okay, okay I thought. Serious face "Based on fact that the man who opened the urn received the most direct exposure it would explain the different effects than the rest of the crew. Possibly in high concentrations of this germ causes crystallisation of cell tissue in a endothermic process. The bug may feed on heat. It may also be a cell colony of some kind and upon dispersion it behaves on a molecular level with subtler effects. The dispersed germ took several hours probably to reach the crew on deck. The story about the portal seems to speak of mass hallucinations as first symptoms. Later paranoia , and it would seem finally , insanity sets in. This germ seems to shut down the rational part of the brain."

"Thank you, Rayce. Perhaps, Mrs. Hart, you can fill the Doctor in on what we found." Harry unconsciously looked at his badge.

"We found that the survivor has a abnormally low body temperature. He seems relatively calm but he keeps insisting that what they saw was real. He could be an overly superstitious person- lab testing will be needed. We have him in thermal blankets but he is still borderline hypothermia. Also, we have sweeped the hold with instruments and find no trace of any germ or airborne anomaly. The physical evidence is quite interesting there. There are what can only be termed 'trails' on the steel hull and hold floor. We have done a preliminary examination with a field microscope and the steel has been stress fractured at these "trails" by what could only be ice crystal expanding in the metal and then melting."

I started tapping my watch and a thought occurred to me. "Do you have a newspaper handy. Today's preferably."

"What? What on Earth do you want a paper for? What a strange-" Mrs. Hart started to argue as Harry stuck at folded paper in her face and to me. and said, "Here you go."

I scanned the headlines and found what I was looking for: "This reporter. Here." as I pointed to the front page article on the latest Bay Slaying, "get in contact with him, and I'll need a phone number of the Police Inspector in charge of the case. I'm sure there details the police haven't released to the Press."

Mrs. Hart was speechless. Harry simply put his hands in his pockets and waited- knowing my strange way at the association of disparate facts. And thirty minutes of cajoling and credential dropping, I confirmed what I feared.

"Well. It would seem our 'bug' went to land shortly after landfall. I must change my postulation after talking to Inspector Evanhope and what she stated she found at the crime scenes. I believe we have a organized creature, possibly on a macroscopic level, on our hands. One that feeds on body heat. It might not be able to bear bright light. Incredible as it seems, it may have been in a long hibernation cycle. Not unheard of-some frog 'dry up' and hibernate for decades at a time until water regenerates them."

"But Millennia? Surly you must be joking! Where did you dig this crackpot up from Prof. Walsh?" Hart seemed to go on the offensive.

"Dr. Cliburn is here precisely because he has the ability to extrapolate diverse data into to SCIENTIFIC theories to get problems solved. He does because others are too narrow-minded or too afraid to state what at some times is improbable, but indeed the truth!" Harry once again came to my defense and once again Mrs. Hart was speechless.

I breathed a sigh of relief. "Okay, now that were done with that business. Do we all agree that we need to get ALL these urns in Bio containment vessels?" Nods all around.

Tapping my watch I said, "Good. Because it's going to be a long night...." 


End file.
